Cosmolosophy is what I hope will be a useful new framework for finding meaning and direction in a complicated environment of information, social expectations and economic realities.The intent is to create a new synthesis of science and faith; as well as to strive for a description of us and our place in the Cosmos that balances a questioning mind with the need for that which transcends the merely rational.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Sentient choice does matter

The following post was prompted by the
article in NBCNEWS.com and linked below.

I have
made a lot of noise in my posts here in the Cosmolosophy Blog about
the unique aspects of sentient choice as it relates to the entirety,
and what makes up the entirety. The choices we make matter as I have
said many times before.

A new
experiment done by a team lead by Howard
Wiseman, director of Griffith University's Centre for Quantum
Dynamics, has given a good deal more credence to that notion.

I quote NBC's abbreviated rendition of the original "Live Science" piece in its entirety below. Before you go there, however, I want to make something quite clear.

I
would just hope that physicists everywhere would take this notion to
heart in a philosophical sense as well as a practical one. Especially when one considers their approach to looking into the deeper
aspects of what constitutes matter. Bashing away with particle accelerators at it seems wrong to me both because of the risk such
inputs might have to the ultimate of complex systems, but also
because when we choose violence it should be under the constraints of
a good deal of moral consideration.

I
know that the universe itself does high energy interactions all of
the time, but that is via the natural progression of interactions
since inflation first began. When we choose to do it it is a whole
different ball game, as I think ought to be quite clear now.

As the NBC article states:

“The
phenomenon was outside of contemporary experience in physics and
seemed to violate the theory of relativity, which posits that the
speed of light is an absolute limit on how fast any information can
travel. Einstein proposed that the particle isn't in a superposition
state, or two places at once; but rather it always has a "true"
location, and people just couldn't see it.

ALICE
AND BOB

The
phenomenon is demonstrated with a thought experiment in which a light
beam is split, with one half going to Alice and the other to Bob.
Alice then indicates if she detected a photon and if so what state it
is in — it might be the phase of the wave packet that describes the
photon. Mathematically, though, the photon
is in a state of "superposition," meaning
it is in two (or more) places at once. Its wave function, a
mathematical formula that describes the particle, seems to show the
photon has no definite position.

"Alice's
measurement collapses the superposition," meaning the photons
are in one place or another, but not both, Howard Wiseman, director
of Griffith University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics, who led the
experiment, told Live Science. If Alice sees a photon, that means the
quantum state of the light particle in Bob's lab collapses to a
so-called zero-photon state, meaning no photon. But if she doesn't
see a photon, Bob's particle collapses to a one-photon state, he
said.

The
experiment is described in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature
Communications.

"Does
this seem reasonable to you? I hope not, because Einstein certainly
didn't think it was reasonable. He thought it was crazy," he
added, referring to the fact that Alice's measurement looked like it
was dictating Bob's.

The
paradox was partially resolved years later, when experiments showed
that even though the interaction between two quantum particles
happens faster than light (it appears instantaneous), there is no way
to use that phenomenon to send information, so there's no possibility
of faster-than-light signals.

SPLITTING
PHOTONS

The
team at Griffith, though, wanted to go a step further and show that
the collapsing wave function — the process of Alice "choosing"
a measurement and affecting Bob's detection — is actually
happening. And while other experiments have shown entanglement
with two particles,
the new study entangles a photon with itself.

To
do this they fired a beam of photons at a splitter, so half of the
light was transmitted and half was reflected. The transmitted light
went to one lab and the reflected light went to the other. (These
were "Alice" and "Bob" of the thought
experiment.)

The
light was transmitted as a single photon at a time, so the photon was
split in two. Before the photon was measured, it existed in a
superposition state.

One
lab (Alice) used a laser as a reference, to measure the phase of the
photon. If one thinks of light as a repeating sine wave, phase is the
angle one is measuring, from 0 to 180 degrees. When Alice changed the
angle of her reference laser, she got varying measurements of the
photon: Either her photon was in a certain phase or it wasn't present
at all.

Then
the other lab (or Bob) looked at their photons and found the photons
were anti-correlated with Alice — if she saw a photon he did not,
and vice versa. The state of Bob's photon depended on what Alice
measured. But in classic physics that shouldn't happen; rather, the
two particles should be independent of one another.

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About Me

I am retired now, but I used to make my living as a Systems Analyst\Developer.

As my real passion has always been ideas, writing, reading, social change and music I am devoting myself to all of these. The primary focus, however is on social change.

It is my firm belief that Capitalism is obsolete. It has been rendered so because of electrified information systems. Not only do these make human skill as a commodity absurd, they also turn information into money, and money into information. At the very least, this reality makes representational Democracy virtually impossible because it can longer move freely. As a commodity it is necessarily subject to the net gain requirement in any exchange. As such information flow is seldom conducted for the benefit of the receiver.